Welcome to the Illinois Transitions Blog

This blog provides a platform for resources to be shared and discussions to be engaged in by anyone providing transitioning services. The content of the blog is especially applicable to those involved in the Illinois Transitions Academy.The Transitions Academy is designed to assist colleges and partnerships working on developing Bridge and ICAPS (Integrated Career and Academic Preparation System) programs by increasing awareness of the expanding partnership between Adult Education and Career and Technical Education as it relates to the ICAPS model, Accelerating Opportunity, Illinois Bridge programs, and Illinois Programs of Study. The Transitions Academy is designed to assist colleges and partnerships working on developing Bridge and ICAPS (Integrated Career and Academic Preparation System) programs.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Team Teaching: Let's Talk Kishwaukee... By Sarah Goldammer, SIPDC

From
Tricia D. Wagner, Director, Adult Education, Kishwaukee College

There is a
great deal that can be done from a professional development perspective to
cultivate skills within instructional staff members, to equip them with
resources, and to assist them in understanding instructional strategies that
promote effectiveness in a team-teaching setting. However, a lot of the success
in team teaching depends on the characteristics and attitudes that the
instructors bring with them into the project in the beginning. I have been
lucky to have the opportunity to work with adult education and CTE
instructional staffs that are gifted in ways that make them great team
teachers, and here is what I have learned from them:

Attitude is everything. Teachers
instructing together in a team have to be willing to work this way, and it is
even better if they are excited about it. Jim Collins, author of Good
to Great, says that for effectiveness you have to “get the right people on
the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right
seats.” Team teaching won’t work if your teachers don’t want to be on the bus
or would rather not sit together. Teaching is a relationship-dependent
occupation, and the teachers working together have to be as capable at brewing
chemistry between them as they are at creating chemistry in the
classroom. One of our challenges, of course, is that we don’t always have
the luxury of doing a wide, long search to look for the perfect pairing; in
many cases, the participating instructors are determined by the nature of the
integrated pathway, and also perhaps by scheduling constraints. This is
where attitude comes into the picture. Instructors who can approach ICAPS
instructional activities with interest and enthusiasm will be more likely to be
able to see the road in front of them clearly when the storms come.

How has team teaching enhanced instruction within the
adult education program at Kishwaukee?

Understanding is everything, too. ICAPS,
with its team teaching approach, has given us the opportunity to work across
disciplines from multiple viewpoints, including administration, instruction,
curriculum, support, and advising. This is valuable. Integrated pathways
programming allows adult educators and leaders in the field of adult learning
to gain a truer understanding of the scope of the community college. We are
getting to peek behind the curtain of “postsecondary education,” which is in
danger of living only on a shelf in our offices, veiled, as an
abstraction. The understanding we are gaining from rubbing shoulders,
closely, with administrators, teachers, advisors, and students in career
pathways programs is serving to illuminate the something on that shelf,
revealing to us what postsecondary education actually looks like. By studying
this through working to develop and improve our ICAPS program, we are growing
in our understanding of what students need to know, and what skills they need
to develop, to be successful when they make the transition to
college. This strategy of functioning across disciplines, of building
networks of relationships all over the college and throughout the community,
linking with partners and other educators and employers, is our new normal in
adult education. This is a great new normal to deal with. Although the water
feels rough sometimes, its current is strengthening us, making us better aware
of the advantages we can provide to our students by being well-connected and
maintaining a strong knowledge base about postsecondary education and
transition.

What advice do you have for administrators working
with team teachers?

And Communication is also everything. A
challenge that everybody struggles with, whether an administrator, a faculty
member, an advisor, or a coordinator, is grappling with the complexity inherent
with a new program. The ICAPS program has many intricacies, and it is
important that those in the leadership roles acknowledge this and make sure
that the bases are covered in educating everyone involved about the program,
providing extra clarification and detail with the parts that are most relevant
to each individual. As everybody has a thousand things on their plates,
naming a designee to communicate is called for. A common pitfall in implementing
something new lies in assuming that everyone understands what is going on, or
has been filled in on details, or changes, by somebody else. Going through the
exercise of providing regular check-ins can keep team teachers and other
partners on the bus, helping them to be adventuresome travelers with a roadmap
in their hands, confident in their knowledge that we are going somewhere.